| Summary: | 碩士 === 中國文化大學 === 英國語文學系 === 101 === Abstract
In the nineteenth-century Victorian America, women are expected to exist as a saint as St. Mary to sacrifice her whole life to her home, her husband, and her children. The New Women at that time are despised for their ignorance of the importance of the institution of the society and marriage and their selfish demands for female rights, equality, and freedom. The moralists satirize them as ugly, unwomanly, and tasteless women in the comics and magazines. The New Women are pushed to face the dilemma.
The protagonist Edna Pontellier in The Awakening is different from the two types depicted above. Awarded of her own blindness to choose the road of her marriage and motherhood, her nature is awakened accidentally in her summer trip to the exotic, romantic, and casual Grand Isle by the open and sensuous Creole society. Like a female animal, she responds to the calling of the nature.
To declare her self-ownership, Edna is willing to pay and doesn’t care about the cost. However, in the end, she realizes one thing: being a mother, she has no way to return. The story ends in her free and last choice in committing suicide. The only way to insist on her independence and her love for her sons is the rebirth from death in which she can be liberated in the unlimited sea and be reborn in her carefree childhood memory.
This thesis consists of five chapters: Chapter One introduces the historical context of the novel. Chapter Two is the brief introduction of the New Women writing and the Free Love Movement. Chapter Three discusses the significance of the metaphors of liberation. Chapter Four analyzes the dilemma of the self-ownership and the reason why the novel is regarded as morally forbidden; and Chapter Five is the
conclusion of the above discussion.
All of the New Women style of Chopin’s own life, the phenomena of New Women, and the free love movement are reflected upon the plot of The Awakening. The implicitly forbidden topics of sexuality and adultery force it to be silent. The Awakening cuts down Chopin’s literary life at her time but establishes her reputation in the history of American canons after nearly half of century.
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